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Part 2, further analyses and discussion.

In your first world-altering book, The Selfish Gene, you describe nature as red in tooth and claw,

referring to the ruthless competitive state in which the world's creatures find themselves in.

As we spoke about in our last

installment, William Paley thought quite the opposite. And here's a quite an entertaining quote

from his book Natural Theology. Paley writes, it is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the

water, team with delighted existence. In a spring noon or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes,

myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view. A bee amongst the flowers in spring is one

of the cheerfulness objects that could be looked upon. Its life appears to be all enjoyment

so busy and so pleased. Happiness is the rule, misery, the exception. Paley was around post-Darwin.

What kind of things would you point Paley towards in the natural world to knock him off

his optimistic pedestal?

Interestingly, that phrase nature read in tooth and claw, Tennyson, wrote it before the origin of species.

It was about eight years before.

Well, I mean, you can pick your arguments, you can pick your examples to illustrate

the benevolence of nature and just the reverse. Darwin himself pointed to the ignomonidy, a group of

parasitic wasps which lay their eggs in other insects caterpillars. The larvae then hatch out and

eat the victim alive from within. And parasitic

wasps do this. I'm not sure Darwin knew this, but they sting the victim in such a way that it's

paralyzed but doesn't rot. So it's still alive, which means, as it were, keeping fresh for the larva to

...